Memory Lapses
by Noam Lupu

On April 28, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) announced an international design competition for the World Trade Center memorial, which will commemorate both the 1993 and 2001 terrorist attacks; the winning proposal will be chosen in October. One can safely assume that the competition will attract a who's who of contemporary architecture, similar to recent international memorial competitions in Berlin and Oklahoma City. But what's less clear is whether the competition will elicit a substantive debate over how to memorialize the victims; so far, the competition's organizers seem to assume that picking a design will be a straightforward process. Which is a shame, because the sheer size of the project presents the opportunity to reconsider how our society remembers its national tragedies.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, it seemed everyone had an opinion on whether to rebuild, what to rebuild and how to memorialize. Temporary memorials ranged from spontaneous collections of letters and flowers to Paul Myoda and Julian La Verdiere's Towers of Light. In November, Fred Bernstein published his proposal for twin piers projecting into New York Harbor that would mimic the WTC towers and symbolically point toward Ellis Island. And both insiders and the public were incensed when the LMDC didn't seem to play along. After the public meeting last July in which the LMDC unveiled its six concepts for redeveloping the WTC site, nearly everyone involved criticized them for "look[ing] like Albany" — shorthand for a lack of imagination.

Many civic groups claimed, as the founder of September's Mission, a group representing victim's families, told one newspaper, that "it's a waste of time to put site plans together without a memorial program in place." Indeed, in its recommendations to city and state officials, the coalition of architects and urban planners known as New York New Visions insisted that the memorial process be "a formal, transparent, and open process to determine the nature and location of memorials."

Nevertheless, American critics, perhaps preoccupied with regime changes abroad, have remained uncharacteristically silent since the LMDC's not-so-transparent selection of Studio Daniel Libeskind's design. This despite the usual New York propensity toward argument, despite the unapologetic nationalism of Libeskind's overt 1,776-foot tower, his Park of Heroes, the Wedge of Light and the physical improbability that "the sun will shine without shadow, in perpetual tribute" into his structure between 8:46 am and 10:30 am every Sept. 11.

More importantly, this silence comes despite a great deal of progress over the past two decades in understanding memorialization. Since the so-called "memory boom" in architecture began in the late 1970s, artists and thinkers have grappled with the problems posed by memorials, their designs and how the public interacts with them. The problems are many, but they largely break down into three questions: First, can memorials — which are often designed to evoke a particular meaning — truly provoke rememberance of all those who died? On the other hand, by causing us to engage with memorials themselves rather than the event it stands for, is it possible that they actually distort the truth? And third, given all this, can we develop nontraditional memorials that will remain true to the event and the purpose they serve?

In response, artists and architects across the globe have been designing memorials that do a better job of evoking memory, of representing events too terrible to imagine and perhaps impossible to represent. Their work, though, hasn't been without controversy. Maya Lin's minimalist Vietnam Memorial in Washington created a space that allowed for reflection, though it was criticized for belying the horrors of the war. Friedrich St. Florian's design for the World War II memorial now under construction on the National Mall in Washington has been criticized for its classical iconography (including sculpted eagles and laurel wreaths), which many architectural observers associate with Albert Speer's plans for Berlin under Adolf Hitler.

And yet for all this rethinking, these sorts of questions are strangely absent from the WTC competition. Remarkably, one of the jury's members, James E. Young, has asked these very sorts of questions of the competition for the Berlin Holocaust memorial in his book "On Memory's Edge." Young even asserted (despite its lamentable phrasing), "Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions and exhibitions in Germany than any single 'final solution' to Germany's memorial problem." But Young has failed to bring such a level of critique to the WTC debate.

At the same time, though, Young's assertion suggests a solution. Imagine just such an annual memorial competition. Imagine the sort of unfinished memorial that such an ongoing process would construct. Imagine an exhibition space, rather than a concretized memorial, that would display, year after year, new designs for a memorial never to be realized. Such an ongoing competition would urge generation after generation to grapple with the magnitude of the 1993 and 2001 attacks. Indeed, one of the guiding principles delimited by the LMDC for competitors is to "inspire and engage people to learn more about the events and impact of Sept. 11, 2001 and February 23, 1993."

Imagine the expected 5 million annual visitors to the WTC site constantly engaging with new and old proposals — proposals submitted in 2003, in 2013 and in 2023. (Imagine the kinds of memorials we would be designing today at Gettysburg, Verdun or Guernica.) It would be an evolving memorial ("evolve over time" is another of the LMDC's guiding principles), one that reinvents itself each year, perhaps even responding to itself. Over time, the WTC site memorial would develop a dialogue on how to fulfill its myriad tasks.

Come July, artists and architects from around the world will have submitted their designs to the LMDC's jury, limiting themselves to the space delimited by Libeskind, to conveying "the spirit and vision" of the Libeskind design, and to presenting a structure that, whatever its accommodations, will never attain consensus. New York and the country seem content to have a priori disqualified the likes of once-exalted nontraditional conceptions such as the Towers of Light or the twin piers. They should reconsider the omission and give Lower Manhattan an ongoing memorial that truly fulfills its complex mission of remembering, healing, engaging and evolving.

E-mail Noam Lupu at noam at flakmag dot com.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)